The Sentience Institute Podcast
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Eric Schwitzgebel on user perception of the moral status of AI
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that i...
Raphaël Millière on large language models
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Ultimately, if you want more human-like systems that exhibit more human-like intelligence, you would want them to actually learn like humans do by ...
Matti Wilks on human-animal interaction and moral circle expansion
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Speciesism being socially learned is probably our most dominant theory of why we think we're getting the results that we're getting. But ...
David Gunkel on robot rights
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Robot rights are not the same thing as a set of human rights. Human rights are very specific to a singular species, the human being. Robots may hav...
Kurt Gray on human-robot interaction and mind perception
30 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“And then you're like, actually, I can't know what it's like to be a bat—again, the problem of other minds, right? There's thi...
Thomas Metzinger on a moratorium on artificial sentience development
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
And for an applied ethics perspective, I think the most important thing is if we want to minimize suffering in the world, and if we want to minimize a...
Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on global priorities research and effective strategies to reduce suffering
28 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“We think that the most important thing right now is capacity building. We’re not so much focused on having impact now or in the next year, we’r...
Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on moral circle expansion, cause prioritization, and reducing risks of astronomical suffering in the long-term future
23 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“If some beings are excluded from moral consideration then the results are usually quite bad, as evidenced by many forms of both current and histori...
Jo Anderson of Faunalytics and Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities on research for effective animal advocacy
24 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We [Faunalytics] put out a lot of things in 2020. Some of the favorites that I [Jo] have, probably top of the list, I’m really excited about our ani...
Ajay Dahiya of The Pollination Project on funding grassroots animal advocacy and inner transformation
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Why inner transformation, why these practices are also built into model: unless we root out the root cause of the issue, which is disconnection, wh...
Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on how we can best help wild animals
18 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“The main work that really needs to be carried out here is work in the intersection of animal welfare science and the science of ecology and other f...
Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on why we should help wild animals
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“We want there to be animals like elephants, who on average have very good lives, rather than animals who tend to have very bad lives… If you have...
Leah Garcés of Mercy For Animals on factory farm investigations, long-term strategy, and animal advocacy during COVID-19
31 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“Our challenge is one where investigations are very hard. The people who do this work, I cannot tell you how smart they are. They are doing all kind...
Frank Baumgartner of UNC-Chapel Hill on policy dynamics, lobbying, and issue framing
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“In my career, one of the things that I’ve focused on the most is developing the theory of punctuated equilibrium. And I think recognising that th...
Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“There’s a relatively clear path on dramatically reducing the costs of the cell culture media. So I’d say it's definitely the most pressing...
Laila Kassam of Animal Think Tank on popular protest movements, mass arrests, and publicity stunts
12 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Social movements often seek to shift public opinion and mobilize supporters on a large scale. But which tactics achieve these goals most effectively? ...
Jayasimha Nuggehalli on capacity building and animal welfare in Asia
07 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“The three things that need to be done for Asia are capacity building, capacity building, and capacity building. There’s this tendency of wanting ...
Lisa Feria of Stray Dog Capital on impact investing and animal-free food tech entrepreneurship
09 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I think we forget sometimes because we look at Impossible, we look at Beyond, that they’re the tip of the spear, but there’s so much work and so m...
Christie Lagally of Rebellyous Foods on scaling up high-quality plant-based foods
07 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since about 75% or so (and that’s just a rough estimate)... of plant-based products on the market today are actually made on off-the-shelf meat proc...
Kristof Dhont of University of Kent on intergroup contact research and research careers
07 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
More positive contact [with an outgroup] reduces prejudice. No matter how you measure it, no matter how you set up your study design, once there’s a...
Pei Su of ACTAsia on humane education in China
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We welcome the Chinese government's policy on the various other nonprofit organizations that they support, and I think this is all a very positiv...
Ria Rehberg of Veganuary on driving institutional change through online campaigns
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I see the pledge program a lot as a means to an end to get institutional change to happen… We're spending about 40% of our staff time and resou...
Kevin Schneider of the Nonhuman Rights Project on using litigation to expand the moral circle
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I think within five years, we will absolutely see… the first nonhuman animals recognized as holders of rights in the US; ‘persons’... [I don’t...